RPI Day 6 Reflection and Changes

After our last RPI session we were asked to have a look at our word work and see how we were timetabling for this in the classroom. This was something that I was focusing on during guided reading and pointing out key words as we were reading however I wasn't actively involving this into my follow up tasks. I have tried a few new things since our last RPI day and I have loved putting them together and my students have enjoyed looking at key words in greater detail. One thing I have really focused on brining back to my literacy program is spelling words and linking these back to the texts that we are reading to give the students more opportunities to see and use these words. 

Spotlight
This has been a great activity that I have been trying in small groups as well as the whole
class. The thing I really like about this activity is that it make the students think about each of the words before we even begin reading the text and allows some of the students who do know what the words mean the opportunity to share with their peers. This activity has also been really beneficial after reading. I have been working with groups through this step so far but it has been great to locate the word with the students and have them reread the sentence or paragraph to find clues about what each word could mean. I am interested to see how the students go working together without teacher input for this part of the activity, so watch this space I will report back with how that goes and the best way to monitor that. 

Word Associations
This has been another activity that I have tried in the last few weeks and the students really enjoy it with being about to connect these words to different words to make sense of the word or to make meaning. After the initial stress of trying to find words that are associated I have also enjoyed preparing this task and walking the students through it and I think it has been really beneficial. 

When have/might you ..?
This is another thing that I have added in which is still developing with my groups. I have
found they are able to think about where the answer but need to elaborate on the answer. The one thing I have found hard with this is finding a good voice recording tool for the students to use on their chromebooks so that I am able to hear the discussions that they are having. 

Next steps
After meeting with my RPI mentor Toni Nua we have come up with a few other things that I can try in the classroom to develop students understanding and knowledge of words. One thing that I am going to try as an overview of a topic or an introduction to a topic is Wordplosion. This will help the students to be able to look at the root words and then be able to build on these words looking at the word families as well as looking at synonyms for words. I am quite excited to try this and I think it lends itself really nicely with our topic for this term. 

RPI Day 6: Vocabulary

I absolutely loved todays session, the focus was around vocabulary and getting our students excited about words. My biggest takeaway was that vocabulary improvement plays a critical role in all aspects of our teaching, this can be either topic specific vocabulary or looking at those tier II words. 

Connecting with Manaiakalani

Our first session with Dorothy Burt this morning was really insightful and I got a lot out of it. I will admit google docs is not an application that I use a lot in the classroom I often revert to slides but after today I will be making changes to how I use google docs. There is so many great things that can be created in docs and I am excited to try some of these new things out in the classroom especially around vocabulary and adding these into my follow up activities and planning. This is definitely a slide deck I will be going back to for ideas on how to change up my follow up tasks and pre reading tasks. 

Background Knowledge

This image slide really resonated with me and made me think about how important vocabulary is to our students. I really liked the use of the spotlight activity and again this is something that I will be using in the classroom. I think it will be a really effective way to see where my learners are at before even reading the text and seeing what our next steps are going forward, this could also pick up other key words that might need some extra focus. Another thing that was a lightbulb moment was reading words into contexts. We were given some really great tools that I will look into using and will just make it a key part of my planning as well.

Word Conciseness

We had a chance to look at some really cool vocab games and challenges that we could try in the classroom. I know my class will love them so am excited to take this back with me into the classroom next week.  This part of the session really highlighted my need to have a visible word wall and this is something that has been added to my holiday to do list!

Explicit, robust learning opportunities 

Looking into tier II words in more detail was really good and being explained the lexical-bar was really interesting. The thing that stood out most and got me thinking about how I can do this is bridging the gap between at home language and school language. This is interesting as it is something that I have been discussing with my class a lot lately especially around professional and unprofessional environments. I really liked the term survival words and I think that is a really important thing to be thinking about when introducing a text to students. 

Cracking Unfamiliar Words

I loved this session as it really made me stop and think about what I actually do in the classroom to make sure that students can chunk words and how they can tackle hard words they come across. I have a lot more tools that I am keen to try out in the classroom and focus on not just looking at this with my lower readers but my higher readers as well. Syllables has been something that we have started looked at with writing poems and I really like the chin test to see how many syllables each word has. 

Morphology

I have really reflected on this part of the day and looked into my teaching practice and seeing where this actually currently fits in my planning and this is definitely an area that I need to put more focus on. I haven't really added this into my long term planning and it becomes something that is occasionally looked at during guided reading or as a vocabulary follow up slide that is never really delved into deeper. I am going to be adding word work into my timetable going forward and there are so many amazing and creative ways that I will be able to do this. I am looking at having a shared text for Matariki next week and am really keen to try out some of the new things that I have learnt today. Spelling progressions is another thing that I am keen to try and look into, I know we have a list that we work off so am going to locate that and add that to part of the program. 

I have really learnt a lot from today and I am really excited to incorporate many of these new ideas in the classroom from next week. I will be adding this to my long term planning. We have planning for learning coming up next week and I am really excited to share this learning with my team and see how we can all incorporate this into our planning. I have decided that I would love to try a word for the day and have different puzzle activities for my students. I am very excited to have those reading and writing connections which I am going to have in my planning so looking at the same sort of text for reading that we will use in our writing to strengthen both areas. I also have lots of my own learning around some of these things we have learnt today which I am excited about. I really did get a lot out of todays session and I am looking forward to next week and the changes that I am going to implement.